Boris Johnson: friend of the Murdoch empire

Thursday 7 July 2011 05.13 EDT
First published on Thursday 7 July 2011 05.13 EDT

Adam Bienkov was quick to note that Boris's line on the phone hacking scandal made an abrupt change of course yesterday:

Boris Johnson is terribly concerned about wrongdoing at News of the World and takes the whole scandal "extremely seriously." This evening he described the allegations as "blatant intrusion," "callousness," "corruption" and said that: "Even if only a small number of people were implicated, these allegations have to be taken extremely seriously and investigated ruthlessly and openly."

Yes Boris takes it all....so seriously that last year he told the London Assembly the phone hacking saga was "a load of codswallop cooked up by the Labour Party" which was "patently politically motivated" and "a politically motivated put up job" and "completely spurious and political" and "a song and dance about nothing" which had been "whipped up by the Guardian and the Labour Party."

In Boris's defence, his handbrake turn reflects the change in the substance of the story, as it emerges that it is no longer mere politicians (including himself) and celebrities (also including himself) whose privacy has been invaded, but ordinary people coping with the most desperate grief. Yet this dramatic switch from derision to righteous indignation has occurred against a backdrop of eager collaboration between Boris and the Murdoch press.

Only last month the News of The World's daily sister the Sun provided Boris with a platform for attacking so-called "soft" justice and presenting himself as the ruthless enemy of villainy. With crime being a top issue in the developing mayoral election campaign, it suits Boris to cultivate a tough-on-crime image. Doing so might divert attention from such unfortunate facts as the approaching cuts-driven removal of 300 police sergeants from London's safer neighbourhoods community policing teams and the continuing rise in serious violence against young people in the capital.

Boris's spokesman appeared to make clear yesterday that for all the Mayor's protestations of outrage, he has no intention of ceasing to write for the Sun, pointing out that no evidence has yet been produced of that paper (or, for that matter, its Murdoch stablemate the Times) obtaining stories by hacking phones. On the Today programme this morning Boris described recent revelations as "deeply sick" and called for a "judge-led" inquiry, yet he declined to say Rebekah Brooks should be sacked and praised Rupert Murdoch's record:

People rant on about how Murdoch has corrupted or coroded our political debate and this kind of thing. I have to say I'm not a believer in all that line of argument...What Rupert Murdoch has done for British journalism over the last 30, 40 years is actually very considerable.

Like David Cameron, Boris needs to be seen to be appalled by what occurred at the News of the World when Brooks was its editor, but needs even more to stay on good terms with her and the full stable of Murdoch papers for which she, as News International's chief executive, is now responsible.

He and Lynton Crosby, the aggressively right-wing strategist running his re-election campaign, will surely want to enjoy the hospitality of the Sun's equally aggressively right-wing pages again in the months to come. As Boris Watch reports, the Mayor has several times enjoyed the wining-and-dining kind of hospitality from Brooks, Murdoch's son James and Murdoch himself in the last couple of years.

Ken Livingstone has this morning accused Boris of trying to "put a lid on" the phone-hacking story:

Confronted with having to do or say anything that might challenge the unaccountable power of the News of the World Boris Johnson chose to shut the issue down. A better Mayor would have pursued the facts and pressed the police harder. Rather than speak truth to power, he defended the powerful and unaccountable....This constitutes the most serious failure to get a grip of the job from this Mayor so far.

This reminds me, though, that Ken has his own complicated history with the Sun: he has, in the distant past, both been described by it as "the most odious man in Britain" and given a column by it. Ed Miliband's position should be seen in the historic light of Tony Blair's grovelling at the Murdoch court. So Boris had a point when he told Today that, "Lots of people have very mixed and contaminated motives in all this." But he, of course, is one of those people.